She was more afraid for her beloved miniature schnauzer than for her own life, and that sealed her fate.

On the night Danielle Thomas was choked and stomped dead in her Astoria apartment, the doomed Weight Watchers exec had rejected a worried friend’s offer of a hotel room and instead rushed home to protect her little dog “Schnoozer” from her unhinged, lawyer boyfriend, Jason Bohn, prosecutors revealed in dramatic opening statements Wednesday at his Queens murder trial.

“She didn’t take the room,” prosecutor Patrick O’Connor told jurors, explaining that Bohn had threatened to kill the black-and-white pooch in the past.

“It was for the love of her dog,” the prosecutor said of Thomas’ decision to return home. “She was afraid for her dog.”

Thomas was found bludgeoned, face up and partially clothed in her bathtub, which Bohn had filled with bagged ice from a nearby Rite Aid before fleeing.

“How does that feel? How does that feel?” the Midtown contracts attorney was recorded taunting as he strangled Thomas, something jurors will hear for themselves thanks to Thomas’ cell phone having accidentally pocket-dialed a friend’s voicemail during the attack.

In reading aloud to jurors from a transcript of the call, O’Connor paused after that particular taunt, turned toward the defense table and taunted Bohn back, “How do you THINK it feels?”

The defense objected, and the prosecutor resumed reading from the transcript of the harrowing call — during which the dying Thomas repeatedly begs, “Jason! I love you!”

Cornered by the damning voicemail, along with 911 calls from neighbors who heard Thomas’ last screams and a history of previous battering attacks that had left her bruised and on crutches, Bohn has admitted to the slaying.

But he is hoping his life story — a rags-to-riches-to-handcuffs tale of graduating from Columbia University after being abandoned by his career-minded mother and drug-addicted father and spending his teens in a group home — will sway the five-women, seven-men jury to acquit him of murder and convict on a lesser charge of manslaughter.

Bohn’s mother, Maureen O’Connell, chief financial officer at Scholastic, was not in Queens Supreme Court on Wednesday, and may testify for the defense.

“How did someone like him end up in a courtroom charged with murder in the first degree?” defense lawyer Todd Greenberg asked jurors during his own opening statements.

“The answer is mental illness,” said Greenberg, who promised to prove that Bohn suffers from “intermittent explosive disorder” brought on by childhood trauma.

Prosecutors are countering that everything Bohn did in torturing, killing and then abandoning Thomas was calculated and intentional.

“This case is about a brutal, deliberate, methodical, sadistic murder of a young, vivacious 27-year-old woman by this man, Jason Bohn,” prosecutor O’Connor told jurors, pointing at Bohn at the defense table.

Bohn is caught on video purchasing the ice at Rite Aid, and was mentally together enough moments after the slaying to send a venal, grammatical text to a female friend.

“I wanted her out of the picture,” he texted the pal, referring to Thomas. “She’s been nothing but trouble since the beginning.”

Schnoozer — Thomas had affectionately called the adorable dog, “Schnoozie” — and his tragic mistress are now together only in photographs, one of which was identified to jurors Wednesday by the first prosecution witness.

“That’s Danielle holding Schnoozer,” Thomas’s mother, Jaime Thomas-Bright, 50, of Danville, Kentucky, said of the photograph while crying softly on the witness stand.